New places of design: nomadic workshops

This contribution presents reflections on design intended as training, research and work together with the theorization of new practices and new places that define the designer’s nature in relation to the demands of design and materials and to the relationships between universities, research and small enterprises. In particular, we intend to think about the designer’s possibilities of intervention in specific local realities, enriched by their knowledge, while putting in place a virtuous circle made up of relationships and active exchanges of skills. The figure of the “priest of materials” therefore emerges within a “materiolab”, a new type of place of knowledge, that is not necessarily a physical place, but rather a research standard. A nomadic workshop, since the designer-researcher is the bearer of his knowledge, tools and ability to explore and create. The aim of this “place of thought” is to critically highlight the processes that derive from the sedimentation of a specific know-how linked to the territories and experiences that have been able to follow one another over time, increasingly enriching our knowledge. The target is to basically offer a reflection on the need for pre- design in the new design and methodological scenarios and on common sense in the design with materials and of materials; it is an invitation to the contemporary designer to bring his specific contribution on the methodological dimension of the project activity in which the experimentation with materials becomes an experimentation of the space of possibilities intrinsic to their very nature.